It wasn’t so long ago that alleged author, James Frey, was in Oprah’s good graces. And a spellbound Oprah had showered him with approbation, urging her readership to drive on down to Barnes & Noble and pick up his earth-shattering tell-all book about his experiences as a drug addict and bad boy extraordinaire. Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces” had tugged on her heartstrings like no piece of fraudulent fabrication before it. An inspiration to addicts across the nation, Frey offered hope that, with a little time and perseverance, any member of the semi-literate narcotic-abusing set could deceive the mighty Oprah on daytime TV and unleash himself into history as a notorious con-artist.

Even after the fog of deception lifted and it was evident that Frey had embellished a bit, invented a little and exaggerated here and there, Oprah stood by her word, deciding that the hard truth paled in comparison to the “emotional truth” behind his tale. In effect, she regarded the revelation with a nonchalant shrug. But, Oprah’s viewers weren’t so readily forgiving, realizing that they had been suckered by a pseudo-tough guy who couldn’t even be an interesting writer without pretending to be an interesting junkie.

After all, junkies are a dime a dozen. I can barely step out my front door without stumbling over a recovering addict, and they’ll usually tell you their harrowing tale of drug addiction free of charge, whether you care to hear it or not. Frey wasn’t selling anything new so, what made his stuttered scribbles worthy of the Bestseller list? Why, Oprah, of course.

Now, Oprah has had a change of heart. Feeling “duped,” deceived and heartbroken, she has since put Frey back on her couch, so that he might answer for his appalling behavior. The humbled and humiliated Frey had no choice but to sit in front of the studio audience and invent excuses for himself. Without Oprah’s glittering recommendations, Frey would be working in a field more suitable to his talents, rolling burritos at Taco Bell.

The truth is that nobody wanted to publish his work of fiction because if you write a fictional book on drug addiction, it at least has to be interesting and original. Since Frey’s book was based on his own experiences, which were too dull for fiction, it was dubbed a memoir. And seeing as he was just a run-of-the-mill junkie with an unremarkable life, there was a need for some filler.

In his defense, Frey claims that he had adopted a tough guy self-image in order to overcome his addictions, and, unconsciously, he had slipped into character while penning his atrocious heap of caca. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to transform into the literary bad boy with the mysterious tattoo on his knuckles. Certainly, it was more appetizing that the truth: the sniveling druggie who has to bullshit his way onto the bestseller list?

Frey’s second memoir, “My Friend Leonard,” another raging success, also touches on some of the more interesting things that didn’t happen in the author’s life. And now that his books are out there and surrounded by scandal, they are all that more appealing to the remainder of the literate public, who will buy the things just to see what all the fuss is about. Frey can make a profitable career as the writer who deceived Oprah: the mysterious, honesty-challenged scribe who may or may not have been a drug addict. He’s probably penning his third memoir at this very moment, “The Afternoon I Lied to Oprah.”

But, really, what was all the fuss about anyway? The whole world is in rehab. Even Rush Limbaugh is in recovery, and it hasn’t made him any more interesting. You can hardly blame Frey for embellishing the truth. It’s hard enough to face the fact that you wasted so many years poisoning your body, let alone admitting that the whole experience was rather mundane. But Oprah, of all people, should have known better than to trust a junkie.